NASA’s AIM mission is coming to an end after 15 years in space. In a short blog post, the agency officially announced last Thursday that it was ending operational support for the spacecraft due to a battery power failure.
NASA first noticed problems with AIM’s battery back in 2019, but the mission was still sending a significant amount of data back to Earth. After the recent drop in battery power, NASA states that AIM has become unresponsive. The AIM team will monitor the spacecraft for another two weeks in case it restarts. But judging by the language used in the blog post, NASA isn’t very hopeful.
NASA launched the AIM – Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere – mission in 2007 to study night glowing clouds, also known as fossilized clouds because they can stay in Earth’s upper atmosphere for hundreds of years. The spacecraft has proven invaluable to scientists, with data collected from its observation point 600 kilometers above the planet’s surface. Data collected by AIM was used in 379 peer-reviewed papers, including a recent 2018 study that found that methane emissions from human-caused climate change are causing night glow clouds to form more frequently.
Considering that initially this task was expected to operate for only two years, it can be safely said that the amount of data it collects cannot be underestimated.
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